The present invention relates to a quality management system, and more particularly relates to a quality management system designed for use with a human-machine interface software application for industrial automation.
Automation software can be used to help businesses such as process and manufacturing industries improve their productivity and profitability by combining factory automation equipment and control devices with software products that are focused on customer objectives. If exploited to its full advantages, industrial automation software can help reduce development costs, lower project life-cycle costs, and provide faster and easier application development. In addition, some software programs, such as CIMPLICITY(copyright) automation software, available from GE Fanuc, provides real-time information about the plants and processes to assist in making more productive decisions.
Automation software can affect many aspects of an operation. Such software can integrate operational and IT systems, allowing better management of the infrastructure and improving the return on investment from ERP systems. Production management capabilities can include assistance in managing work-in-process inventory, finding critical jobs on the production floor, meeting production schedules, improving the utilization of manufacturing resources and collecting and managing production critical data. Such software may further assist in monitoring power quality and consumption for preventing peak demand surcharges. Plant floor employees can be provided with information to make better decisions in real-time when they are most effective. Operators can be provided with important process data needed to improve yield and reduce scrap.
Finally, automation software can be used to monitor the quality of the connected control systems by collecting monitoring associated data. Data analysis may include analyzing data collected by the software system and comparing current trends with past trends to identify and correct process problems. Other useful functions for managing quality include data logging, historical data viewing, and data modification and recalculation. To take advantage and make sense of these functions, some software systems offer reporting packages that help the customer to generate basic process-related reports. Reports may be retrieved on-demand, or may be produced on a timed or event basis.
The prior art quality management systems, as they relate to automation software, have lacked some degree of sophistication in that the collected data has been limited to the outputs and status of the connected control devices. That is, the data logging capabilities of the prior art have been primarily limited to receiving raw and calculated data directly from the control devices. Thus, the retrieved information has had to be manipulated to provide useful readings to the user, and, in effect, has provided a retroactive method of quality management.
In an exemplary embodiment of the invention, a quality management system preferably comprises a first operator station adapted to receive manual entry operations, a second operator station adapted to receive data from gages, test equipment, control devices, and power monitoring devices, and at least a subset of these elements electrically connected to the second operator station. The management system further preferably includes an application server storing a first program for setting up customer quality information, a second program for generating reports, a third program for logging to a database, and a fourth program for maintaining events. A database server stores a local database and a web server stores a capability warehouse in the quality management system. The first operator station, second operator station, application server, and database server are connected over a shared network, while the web server is connected to the database server over a web connection.
A computer based process for managing quality of the connected electrical equipment preferably comprises providing the network to support the operator stations and servers, manually inputting a selection of critical to quality factors into the first operator station, sending, over the network, the selection of critical to quality factors to the application server, configuring the critical to quality factors in the application server, storing configured critical to quality factors in the local database stored in the database server, connecting the electrical equipment to be monitored on a quality basis to a the second operator station, collecting data from the electrical equipment into the second operator station, storing the data from the electrical equipment in the local database, combining the data from the electrical equipment with the configured critical to quality factors to form process capability data, sending the process capability data from the database server to the capability warehouse in the web server, updating an entitlement database embedded in the capability warehouse, sending new schema information from the entitlement database to the local database; and, reporting information from the local database to the first operator station.
The above-discussed and other features and advantages of the present invention will be appreciated and understood by those skilled in the art from the following detailed description and drawings.